Life Transmissions
Bas Jan Ader, Sarah Bostwick, Joshua Callaghan, Megan Daalder, Karl Haendel, Mary Kelly, John Mills, Jed Ochmanek, Gina Osterloh, Robert Rauschenberg, Peter Wu
October 6 – November 2, 2014
Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery, Orange, CA
Life Transmissions; Catalog
Art never expresses anything but itself.
Oscar Wilde
I feel like I'm too busy writing history to read it.
Kanye West
The question of what is at the beginning of things - paralleling the metaphor of the chicken and the egg - is negotiated in this exhibition. Is it life that inspires our creative production, or is it precisely art and our creations that enable us to recognize and maneuver the world? The exhibition looks at interdependencies and correlations between these views, and presents a line up of positions that mine this interstice via indexical, mimetic, linguistic, and semiotic tactics.
An old ideal of art and its beauty is that of the perfect illusion. The legendary competition between the ancient Greek painters Zeuxis and Parrhasios illustrates this: Here Zeuxis’s skills with the brush create such a remarkable copy of reality that a flock of doves is trying to pick the painted grapes. Zeuxis however, inspecting his opponent's work and attempting to remove the curtain that obstructs Parrhasios’s painting, finds out that the joke is on him, as the curtain is in fact part of the work, so masterfully executed that even the great Zeuxis does not recognize it as an illusion.
On the other hand of the spectrum is a view, which the age of enlightenment first introduced, that left a lasting mark on art ever since the project of modernity came into full swing: Art does not mimic the natural world. This view, once a liberation from old doctrines, proposed l’art pour l’art, the autonomous artwork, freed from the burden of illustration, narration and possibly all other relationality.
So far so good, but in a non-centrical art universe, neither one of these views can be said to dominate our ideas of what art is supposed to be and do. In view of a reality of life that itself has become abstracted, in which the list has replaced the picture, where can a distinction be made between a given, non-negotiable ‘reality’ and the realities we create? How close can art get to life before it disappears into the same?
Sniff the Space Flat on your Face
Brian Bress, Marjorie Cameron, Marc Chagall, Animal Charm, Salvador Dali, India Lawrence, Max Maslansky, Juliana Paciulli, Dani Tull, Jeffrey Vallance, Matt Wardell
August 25 – September 25, 2014
Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery, Orange, CA
Sniff the Space Flat on your Face; Catalog
The fundamental phenomena in art are cyclical, and there is a recurring tendency that often marks a period of transition. It appears between the exhaustion of one era and the vitality of another. It is an aggressive, yet greatly refined spirit, that surfaces in periods such as Surrealism, or Psychedelic Art, and owes its heritage to such disparate movements as Hellenism, Mannerism, Rococo and Romanticism, In it lies a suspicion towards the real as the current knowledge of an epoch defines it and its Zeitgeist perceives it, and the general notion that the rational models of art and thought are fragments ‘imposed by the limitations of man's consciousness upon the unlimited variations of his internal and external world.’*
Sniff the Space Flat on your Face brings together historical and contemporary positions working with allegiance to this tradition. The artists in the exhibit summon the irrational, the otherworldly, the dramatic and grotesque. They celebrate the poetry of morphing images, uncovering the beautiful spasms, and marvelous states of excitement, which penetrate into our world from underneath the skin of reality.
*Stanley Krippner, ‘Die hypnotische Trance, die psychedelische Erfahrung und der kreative Akt’
Knock Off
Co-curated with Natalie Lawler
May 19, 2014 – August 15, 2014
Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery, Orange, CA
Your Shell is made of Air
Chris Burden, Molly Corey, Cayetano Ferrer, Dan Graham, Lia Halloran, Olga Koumoundouros, Aaron Garber Maikovska, Alex McDowell, Isaac Resnikoff, Geoff Tuck
January 27 - February 28, 2014
Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery, Orange, CA
Drifting between the Shells: Of Magnetic Levitation, Silent Spectacles and Psychological Derives; Essay
Your Shell is made of Air; Catalog
The guiding focus of Your Shell is made of Air is the shifting idea of how urban space is perceived. Spanning the period from the late 1960’s until today, these conceptions range from political and utopian approaches, to performative interventions and visions of imagined cities.
City space is a manifestation of human life, like a cast that forms in response to human behavior and desire. The shapes of the city, the buildings, streets, squares, shopping malls and residential areas, are the habitat within which we perform our moves, physically and intellectually.
When every environment is only as rich as the actions it allows for, it is a matter of investigating these places for possibilities and applications that are not originally inherent to them. It is the search for these air pockets that brings the artists in the show together. Deviating from this commonality, the searches touch upon ideas of the city as a playground, a sociopolitical laboratory, a psychological dérive, and the exploration of future urban systems in sci-fi cinema.